Nscale

Nscale made history in March 2026 when it raised $2 billion in a Series C at a $14.6 billion valuation, the largest venture round ever closed in Europe. Lead investors include Norwegian conglomerate Aker ASA and 8090 Industries; Nvidia, Dell, Citadel, Jane Street, and Point72 participated. Former UK Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg and former Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg joined the board alongside Susan Decker. The company holds a reported $14 billion contract to supply approximately 200,000 Nvidia GB300 GPUs to Microsoft across sites in the UK, Norway, Portugal, and the US. The round alone accounted for roughly 70% of all London VC deployed in March 2026.

Nscale is the UK technical partner for the Stargate AI Growth Zone build-out. On 23 April 2026, OpenAI paused its planned UK Stargate site at Cobalt Park, North Tyneside, citing an unfavourable regulatory environment and elevated energy costs. The Blackstone and Nscale components of the build continued unaffected, making Nscale the critical delivery vehicle for the UK's AI Growth Zone ambitions. UK industrial electricity runs at roughly four times US levels, with grid-connection delays of three to eight years, shaping the national conversation on compute sovereignty.

Founded in May 2024 by Josh Payne, Nscale operates a vertically integrated stack covering chips, networking, and data centres. Its flagship facilities run on hydroelectric power in Glomfjord, Norway, with further campuses under construction near Narvik. The DSIT Sovereign AI Unit, launched in April 2026, is designed in part to grow UK infrastructure companies to comparable strategic weight. Nscale's infrastructure footprint spans multiple topics: UK sovereign compute policy, European tech sovereignty, AI data centre economics, and the concentration of AI capital.